


Implicit

by youreallsofuckingrude



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Turned Into Vampire, Forge Husbands do Brokeback Mountain, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Love Letters, M/M, Modern Era, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Season 4 onwards, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:26:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24749071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youreallsofuckingrude/pseuds/youreallsofuckingrude
Summary: A letter never sent comes to light. Isaac would have gotten away with his stubborn commitment to a bleak existence if it weren't for his meddling kid.A Vampire AU
Relationships: Hector (Castlevania)/Isaac (Castlevania)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of this [ prompt](https://madnessofmen.tumblr.com/post/618417246182752257/thinking-abt-immortality-and-how-meticulously)
> 
> All mistakes are my own.

**London, England 2020**

Half gazing out at the nighttime scene of the city, Siobhan strides down the second-floor hall of Sotheby’s Bond Street offices in London and bristles in the quiet. She’ll never get used to the sterile feel of the building, the buzzing of the overhead lights and the stony security personnel who, as she passes, turn their heads to regard her, sensing—something. Some holdover from the paleolithic period is probably pinging in the back of their brains, signaling her as a predator.

Lucky for them, Siobhan’s watching her points.

She feels two of the men drop their gazes to her chest, perfectly covered under her black trench coat, and barely suppresses a growl.

It’s not their fault that they’re rude, it’s inbred. Still, Siobhan lets the lights catch her eyes, a little sinister shimmer of cat-like reflection, and projects her thoughts with a sneer. _Pick a windae, S_ _asannaich, and I'll give you wings._

She fails to curbs her smile when both men shudder and turn away.

As a vampire and an archeologist, she prefers to work out of her secluded laboratory at the PSL Research University in Paris. It’s been years since her last visit to England, and if she has to come again in the next century it will be too soon.

She's never liked the rain. Or the sense of imperialism; although, her new home is just as steeped in crimson injustice as this bloody place.

She’s here in person because Sotheby’s president had been unwilling to release a letter, allegedly from the 15th century, to an outside examiner. A wealthy sheik from Dubai—a donor of Siobhan’s university—had requested that Siobhan personally authenticate the letter before buying.

PSL had been all too happy to loan out their most _elusive_ expert.

The owners of the letter, an elderly couple who'd emigrated from Greece in the 50's, had come across the parchment whilst searching their attic for wedding china—their great-granddaughter is set to be married in June. Unfortunately, neither the husband nor the wife had any idea if the letter was penned by an ancestor. And to make matters worse, the author had only identified themselves with a single consonant. Basically, this whole endeavor is a waste of Siobhan’s time.

Irritated that she's been pimped out like some kind of relic blood hound— _har, har_ —Siobhan strides to the entrance of the antiquities department and buzzes the intercom with a harsh shove of her finger.

“Yes?” a voice drawls in a crisp, upper class accent.

“Dr. Siobhan nic Iosag to see the Suffolk letter.”

Siobhan holds her university ID up to peephole when prompted and is permitted entry through the door by a snobby looking young man in tweed trousers that probably cost $3000. With an eye roll at the back of his coiffed head, she follows him to an ultramodern black desk bracketed by some frankly bizarre looking chairs.

No matter how old Siobhan gets or how much wealth she accumulates, she will never understand the human urge to waste money on meaningless shit. You can take the girl out of the Edinburgh slums, but she’ll never forget begging for a crust of bread.

“Miss…”

“It’s Doctor, and you can call me Shiv.”

“Shiv, then. I have a few forms for you to fill out and then you can view the parchment.” Snobby representative’s ID badge says his name is Charles, which Shiv supposes, snorting quietly, is a compulsory name for royal wankers.

She scrawls a signature on the myriad forms Charles slides toward her and tries not to make contact with his skin when he retrieves his pen from her. The difference in temperature always makes people shiver.

With a pleased little harrumph that she’d initialed on every flagged line of the triplicate forms, Charles retrieves a box from a locked safe at the end of the desk and surrenders the letter—sheathed in plastic on a metal tray—for her perusal. Siobhan pulls on the pair of gloves he hands her next and carefully lifts the vellum toward the light.

“Oh.” Her voice catches in surprise. It’s quite well preserved considering where the letter was found. The handwriting and the quality of the iris ink, too, are exquisite. It’s genuine, no doubt about it. Siobhan doesn’t need to run tests to verify, her eyesight and sense of smell are keen enough to detect markers of times long-ago on the parchment.

Times she herself had lived. 

She flares her nostrils, taking in the musty smell of the medieval document and reads, automatically translating the Elizabethan thou-ing and thee-ing.

_My dearest Ise,_

_I am ill with grief about the circumstances of our parting, yet I know it is nothing less than I deserve. I am a coward and you are right to hate me for it. I fear, however, that if I were given the chance to go back and change how things turned out, choose differently, I would not. You see, in addition to my being a coward, I am also selfish. I am not so deluded to think that fate would allow me to cross paths with you twice. So, despite my unhappiness, I am resolved to be content with my actions._

_~~You were~~ You desired a world that was pure, but you were my world—broken and angry as you were. And I loved you for it._

_Selfish coward that I am, I urge you to live, Isaac. If not for my heart in your chest, then for yourself._

_Forget about the endgame, forget about me, forget about the big bloody castle._

_Just live._

_Yours until my corpse molders or the stars turn to ash in the sky. Whichever comes first._

_-H_

There’s a smudge, a bloody fingerprint near the bottom edge of the letter, as though they’d cut themselves worrying the paper between their hands. 

Siobhan swallows, tongue flickering in her dry mouth, scenting…kin.

“Well?” Charles says, breaking her reverie. “Is it authentic?”

“How much was Sheik Al Maktoum’s bid?”

“I’m not authorized to know—”

“Call your boss, then,” Siobhan demands, voice strained, urgent. “Tell her that whatever he’s offering, I’ll double it.”

Charles gapes at her serious expression, the promise of retribution in her eyes if he doesn’t comply, and reaches for the phone. “Yes Miss—Dr. Shiv.”

Siobhan briefly inclines her head, enjoying his alarm. When the warble of the chief auctioneer can be heard under the fast lilt of Charles’ speech, she turns her back and fishes her own phone out of her pocket, punching the first name in her favourites.

_Please pick up…_

He answers on the first ring. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this phone call?”

“Athair,” Siobhan breathes, as soothed by the sound of his voice as she was when he’d found her near death in an alleyway over half-a millennium ago. “I think I’ve found something you’re going to want to see.”

***

Siobhan's last name, nic Iosag, means daughter of Isaac.

Pick a windae, yer leavin = fuck off 

Sasannaich = Saxon (plural) in Scottish Gaelic 

Athair = Father in Scottish Gaelic


	2. Chapter 2

**Northwestern Montana, USA 2020**

Isaac smells her licorice scent above the dirt and flowers as soon as he opens the door of his greenhouse, but he makes no sign of it.

Siobhan was his first and only progeny. She’d been starving and feverish with tuberculosis, aged nineteen to his two hundred years, when he’d found her. He’d been in Scandinavian held Scottish territory, looking for Godbrand’s clan, hopeful that they would end his immortal life if he confessed to the boor’s murder. Unfortunately for him, they’d set sail for the Mediterranean some forty years prior.

With his ultimate suicide attempt sufficiently thwarted—he'd tried greeting the sun and drowning himself multiple times before that—he’d journeyed back to Edinburgh, wishing for someone in the stinking city to attack him. He'd wanted to mete out a quarter of the rage he felt about his turning on an unsuspecting human.

Or ten.

What he’d discovered instead was a slip of a girl, easily mistaken for a ghost if not for her shock of auburn hair, fending off a pack of men behind a tavern with a broken bottle. Siobhan’s would be rapists had fled at the first sight of him, his eerie eyes glittering in the darkness, but Siobhan herself hadn’t so much as quaked with fear. She’d held her ground when he’d revealed himself, and declared, “Come any closer, vampire, and I’ll split you up the middle.”

He'd been head over heels for her whether he’d known it or not.

She’d fascinated him.

He’d been alone for so long, longer than he’d been a vampire. He’d found himself edging toward her despite her threat, offering her his cloak to ward off the chill. And later, when she’d dropped the bottle in favour of some desiccated meat he’d liberated from a street vendor, he’d found himself offering her a new life. A life free of ailment and poverty.

Greed, human and simple, had risen up from the depths of his godforsaken soul screaming, _grab onto this one._ A true parasite, he’d needed someone to cleave to in the endless night that stretched before him.

Sickly Siobhan hadn’t hesitated to accept his promises of immortality. Of family.

Nothing left to lose, she’d sagged against the bricks behind her, offering up her neck with a blasé tilt of her head. The actual process of transformation—a bloody wrist held to blue lips and a snapped neck—had been less elegant than forging demons, but just as effective.

When Siobhan had woken two nights later, she’d smiled at him, chest free of rattling cough, cheeks pink with the colour that life had stolen from her. She'd never regretted her choice. Not that she'd told him anyway.

Isaac absently snips the stem of a Hybrid Tea rose just above the first leaf. _You have a lot in common with Siobhan_ , he thinks wryly. The most beautiful of modern roses, they’re also the most troublesome to care for. 

“You need a hat if you’re going to be up this early,” he says, snipping another stem. “I can smell you cooking.”

It might be dusk, but it's still too early for a young vampire, especially for one with skin as fair as Siobhan’s.

Cursing under her breath, his lass rises out of her crouch behind some citrus scented Eternal Flame roses and slinks over to grab the sun hat that he keeps on a hook next to his trowels.

“I’ll never surprise you, will I?” Siobhan asks, frustrated that he’d foiled her plot. She’d taken the red eye from London to Montana in the hopes that she’d catch him unawares, even going so far as to ditch her rental car on the side of the road, stealthily running the last few miles to the ranch.

“Not for another century yet.”

Siobhan peevishly jams the hat on over all of her red hair and Isaac smirks when he looks up and sees that it’s crooked.

A smile softens her own mouth when her eyes rove over his outfit. “Papa, what the fuck are you wearing?” 

Isaac looks down at the apron he's wearing over his customary black, a bright yellow thing with “I’m the bee’s knees” printed on the front, and frowns at the reminder of his indignity. He attempts to raise a sardonic brow. “Maggie thinks the yellow brings out my eyes.”

Maggie Samuels lives with her grandparents on the next ranch over. Eight years old and endlessly curious about the world, she likes to stop and feed Isaac’s animals on her way home from the bus stop. In exchange for her kindness, he’d started leaving fresh eggs for her family by their mailbox.

He'd not thought much of it, but this past Christmas he’d found the apron and a hand drawn card on his porch with some fresh baked bread. Uncomfortable with the idea of leaving the gesture unanswered, he’d made a special visit with a side of beef; Halal, though it hadn’t mattered to the low-income family. Maggie's grandmother had cried when he'd given it to them.

“Smart girl,” Siobhan murmurs teasingly. He's kept her well informed of his budding friendship with the Samuels family in their monthly FaceTime calls.

Isaac chuckles and digs a pair of gloves from the pocket of his fancy apron, tossing them to Siobhan with ease. “I need to replant the Queen Elizabeth. You can dig.”

***

The moon is high when Isaac hands Siobhan a glass of rich red wine and settles next to her on the porch that overlooks his property.

He’s been here in the Montana Foothills for twenty years and he suspects that he’ll have to move again in another twenty.

It pays to be a recluse, but most neighbours are still suspicious of a youthful face all the way out here in the boonies. Particularly when that face is covered by skin that’s a deep shade of ebony.

“How many calves this year?” Siobhan asks, eyeing the rotund cows lowing in the field. She’d been skeptical when he'd said that he was buying cattle, but thus far they’ve kept him and his various roses rich in manure for fertilizer. And as the only Halal butcher this side of Missoula, he turns a decent profit supplying the few mosques and progressive grocery stores in the area. 

“At least five,” Isaac says. He takes a careful sip of his steaming tisane and narrows his eyes on a Hereford with exceptional girth. “Carmilla may have twins.”

 _That never gets old_.

A faint smile before he takes another sip that warms his icy flesh from the inside out. He suspects he’ll have to call a vet before long. Few cows having twins do so without help.

The thought of those twins, their existence marked with tragedy before they’ve even left the womb, brings a tightness to Isaac's chest. He forces his lungs to take a useless breath and purposely doesn’t think about how he once had the power to save them. Of the person who wouldn’t have hesitated to reach into hell and shove a soul back into their bodies.

Alas, he’s being macabre. The veterinarian that services the ranches and feedlots in this area is very good at his job.

“A-about that letter,” Siobhan says, voice unaccountably nervous.

Ah, yes. The reason for her trip.

Though he’s doubtful that this letter she’s found actually refers to him—no one in his past had been sending him letters—Isaac meets her eyes to show her that he’s listening. Siobhan searches his face, throat moving with her apparent anxiety. “I brought it. You know, in case you’d like to read it.”

“ _Should_ I?”

Siobhan sets her glass down and tightens her arms over her chest defensively. “I think you should.”

“Then I shall.” It’s pointless to argue with her. Siobhan’s as stubborn as a mule once she’s gotten an idea into her head about his well-being. Count on Allah to grant him, of all people, a doting child.

There’s a slight breeze as Siobhan rockets into the house. She returns with a shielded document clutched in her hands before her outline—still visible to a human if one were watching—even starts to blur. She offers the document to him like she might a poisonous spider. Very carefully, with hands that don’t shake.

Isaac wonders what the letter could contain that has her so certain it might bite him.

He opens the folio containing the parchment and encounters plastic. He gazes at that film over slanting script and catches a scent that has him cutting through it with a claw, hastily extended.

He swears that his heart, long dead, beats just once in his chest. 

The name he fights so hard to shove into the corner of his mind containing things that must not be opened, springs with an unholy vengeance to his lips.

“Hector," he whispers, tone somewhere between resentment and reverence. He doesn't hear himself. He doesn't hear anything at all.

He devours the first line and the second and the sixth before tears of red sear his eyes.

_I loved you for it._

The letter tears in his fist. 

“Well there goes half a million pounds.”

So many years. So many years he's tried to make himself hate Hector, replaying and replaying that night in the Styrian keep. Yet another betrayal that convinced him living was not worth the small pleasures it served with it's pain.

And now this?

What is he to think of this?

Isaac hurtles his tea at a cedar column and roars his hurt into the night.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please, please leave a comment or message me on Tumblr if I've severely bungled something re: Muslim views of death. I'm more than happy to change anything that's blatantly wrong or offensive!!!

**Carmilla’s stronghold, Styria 1477**

With a violence only hinted at from the distance of the battlefield, Carmilla watches Striga draw her sword from the scabbard at her hip and slash through a row of night creatures—red, not blue eyed—in one fell swoop.

“They’re slowing,” Carmilla says, eyes glued to the sluggish movements of their own army of demons. She spins around and pins Lenore with a baleful look. “Why aren’t they tearing the other vermin limb from limb? You assured me that this _pact_ ”—she holds up the mystical ring on her hand—“would keep them obedient to our every whim. Yet they fight half-heartedly.”

“Maybe she has not gelded her pet as effectively as she thinks she has,” Morana says sagely, nocking another arrow. She releases the bow string and smiles, following the arrow’s path through the heart of a werewolf prowling at Striga’s back.

The castle-guard fell in the first wave of the attack. Few vampires clad in the Styrian regalia still fight alongside their fierce general. The forged army and Striga's grit is all that stands between the sisters and defeat.

Lenore frowns at Morana’s comment, her gaze straying to the corner where her captive sits in his chains, steadily banging his forehead against the wall as if it’s soothing. “Thank you for your confidence, sister,” she murmurs pleasantly, too pleasantly for her dark expression. “But does he look like someone capable of willful disobedience?”

“He’s coming,” Hector chants to himself. He splits the skin above his right eye open, releasing the smell of ozone—elementally infused blood—into the air. “He’s coming for all of us.”

Lenore glides over and crouches before his splayed legs, seizing his chin in a pincer grip to stop the rocking movement of his head. “Hector, my sweet,” she calls to him, seeking the intelligence that once rose in his blue eyes—or it had. Before she’d broken him. _No matter_. _Even broken toys have their use._ “Hector, I need you to focus. You don’t want us to lose, do you, darling? You know that your lifeforce is tied to mine. If I die, you'll be compelled to follow me.”

Hector raises his head in her hold, his hooded eyes flashing with rare recognition, blue irises darkening to the colour of the stormy sea. Silently, he bares his teeth at her like a feral animal. The bitter smile colours red as blood dribbles down his nose and chin. With a laugh, he grates, “I’m counting on it.”

Lenore loses her patience then, bashing his head against the wall for him. Hector falls unconscious, lashes fluttering closed, lips still curled with genuine mirth.

***

A scream rips through the darkness of Hector’s mind, pulling him back to consciousness.

No. Not just a scream. Her scream.

_Her…_

With difficulty, he slits his eyes open. He sees Death, tall and cloaked in black, slash his blade at Carmilla, charging left and rolling right when she slashes back with her wicked claws. The vampire springs at Death again, and he snatches her by the hair, winding it around his fist.

Caught, Carmilla thrashes and swears in his grip. “It won’t do you any good,” she pants, swiping ineffectually at the hooded face behind her. “Killing me won’t bring the old man ba—” Death opens her pale throat like paper, her words cutting off with a gurgle around his blade.

Light blazes, illuminating the keep and Morana’s face a few feet away, frozen with death in a rictus of horror.

 _Can’t see her. Where is she?_ Hector’s blood pumps faster with fear, giving him the strength to shift his head. A flash of red in the corner of his eye has him emitting a tearfully panicked whimper. His bladder contracts, bones turning to jelly. Before he can think about feeling ashamed, he’s being hauled up from the floor by the roots of his hair and held aloft at Lenore’s mercy.

“Is this what you want?” Lenore sneers, presumably at Death. She shakes Hector like a puppet, his silver locks pulling painfully in her grasp. “You can’t have him. I’ve claimed him and he’s pledged himself to me.”

Hector feels Death’s eyes fall on him with the weight of knowing, with disappointment, assessing his anaemic complexion, the scars at his throat and wrists—his ring. He doesn’t look back as Death removes his hood, revealing his visage for the first time tonight.

“You cannot claim what is not freely given,” Death says, crisp; succinct.

Lenore’s cool superiority cracks with a quiet hiss. “It’s Isaac, isn’t it?” she asks, still sounding deceptively detached, almost bored. “You know, Isaac, Hector cries your name when he’s inside of me and sometimes in his sleep.” She caresses Hector's cheek with her free hand, the movement indulgent like she might pet a beloved dog. Hector takes it with a shiver of revulsion. He doesn’t dare move. He’s too terrified that he might do something horrible like lean into it.

The sound of leather boots creaking, readying for attack, and a chorus of growls from beasts in the shadows has him whispering a parched, “Don’t.”

The creaking stops. The growls fall silent.

Just like that.

Unable to help himself, Hector strays one blue eye over to the person he’s missed the most. Missed even more than the version of himself who was proud and strong. Numb glazed calm that must be shock suffuses him as he drinks in Isaac’s face, sharp planes set with rage and grief, but still so handsome. Isaac looks back at him, amber orbs a swirl of tightly leashed emotion.

_Isaac…oh, Isaac…_

Hector remembers a sun dappled afternoon when Isaac had made a joke that wasn’t a joke and he’d been too much of a coward to do anything but laugh. He thinks Isaac would have been gentle with him. Wouldn’t have taken more than he was willing to give. He pushes the thought away, shoves it into the door where he keeps the things that still matter, and turns the key.

_Not now. Not after what I’ve done. Not ever._

Lenore looks back and forth between the two of them and laughs. “As sweet as this reunion is, I don’t have all day. Let’s get on with it, shall we?” She tightens her grip on Hector’s hair as her other hand cups his chin.

Alarm flares in Hector’s eyes. He knows what she intends, remembers waking some mornings in her bed with the tang of copper on his breath. _Think about how he’ll hate you… If I can’t have you, nobody can…_

“No, no, no, no,” he moans, eyes darting rapidly, muscles cording with adrenaline.

She snaps his neck with a smooth jerk. Hector hears the snap, and everything goes black again.

***

“Catch!” The female vampire singsongs to Isaac, throwing Hector’s limp body at him.

Isaac catches him automatically, because what else is he supposed to do? He’s been catching Hector since he first arrived in Dracula’s court, too fresh-faced and friendly for his own good.

Something harsh and grating swells in his chest when he clasps the other man’s body to him, flesh still warm and giving. With a tenderness he didn’t think himself capable of, Isaac lowers Hector’s body to the ground and faces the last of the Styrian sisters. He doesn’t know who she is, but he can guess from Hector’s frightened demeanor who she was to him.

Bile lurches in Isaac's gut, his own memories, long repressed, stirring under the anger and bitterness he’d buried them in. “You will pay for this,” he says. “Painfully.” It’s a sincere promise.

The vampire just smiles, her lips a mocking twist. “I look forward to it.”

It’s bravado, Isaac knows. She’s surrounded. She won’t be leaving this tower alive.

The vampire flashes her fangs, lunging straight at him, only to disperse into a swarm of bats. They scratch at him with their razor-sharp claws, raking bloody furrows across the exposed skin of his face and hands. He tries to shield himself with his arms, but there’s too many. He can’t see. Where—

There.

With a well-timed spin, he avoids the vampire’s jaws as she reforms in the melee, jabbing out at the center of her mass with his knife. She blocks, and the fight is on.

Isaac slashes in controlled arcs, spinning and sidestepping to keep her in front of him. _Feint, stab, parry._ He feels his upper lip raise, bearing his own teeth in an ugly snarl. All of the aggression he’d so carefully bottled over the years comes howling to life inside of him as he attacks, each movement loaded with malice for the vile things the vampire had said earlier.

_Hector cries your name when he’s inside of me…_

The sound of metal screeching off of claws as hard as diamonds sounds throughout the keep as they clash again and again, grappling—searching for each other’s weak points.

Too late, Isaac realizes that the vampire’s simply tiring him out, appearing and disappearing in a calculated pattern. He takes a step back, breathing hard, and she takes the opportunity to mist inside his guard, catching him with a backhand to the face.

A tooth pops loose near the back of his mouth. He spits it and his blood onto the floor, rocking his jaw, clamping down on a sharp flare of pain.

“Ooo,” the redheaded bitch coos at him, eyes raking over him like she’s just seen something shiny. “What kind of sound do think Hector will make if I present him with a necklace made of your teeth?”

“The problem with you immortals is that you all talk too much.” Isaac’s voice is low, gravelly with fatigue from the earlier battle. The tall one, the warrior sister, had broken several of his ribs.

He grips his knife hilt in his left hand and charges, striking at the vampire’s head. She blocks, but not before he catches her across the cheek.

He charges several more times, but each one is parried. Isaac staggers, clothes damp with sweat, muscles burning with a build-up of acid. Growling in anger at his weakness, he locks his elbows and blocks a stroke from the back. Before he can even register that he’s managed to catch the hit, the vampire mists inches from him, punching her fist straight through his chest.

Agony.

The squeeze of the vampire’s fingers around his heart keeps Isaac from succumbing to the blackness.

“Such a strong heart,” the vampire tsks. “Annoyingly tenacious. Perhaps it was you Carmilla should have taken. You might not have broken so easily.” She smirks, so confident. “Perhaps I’ll eat it. Take some of that tenacity for myself.”

Through the haze descending on his mind, Isaac registers the weight of his knife in his hand. He hadn’t dropped it in the confusion. The vampire squeezes her hand again, this time starting to pull. Isaac's vessels rip and tear, flooding his chest cavity with blood.

Dracula's face and Hector's miserable grimace flash behind his eyes. With a last push of strength before he bleeds out, Isaac raises his arm from his side, plunging his knife into the vampire’s breast.

The look on her face is worth his death.

Isaac rewards her with a twist of the blade, her body catching flame and turning to ash. He collapses there, in her sooty remains, his blood seeping out to pool around him in a halo of crimson. Light appears in the tunnel of his vision and he smiles, revenge mostly accomplished, content to die at peace.

***

Hector wakes, having dreamed of Lenore pouring blood down his throat. He rolls over and heaves, stomach empty but for a paltry amount of bile—a remnant of his human alimentary system.

He’s a vampire now. Knows it in the way that his deadened heart doesn’t beat with fear in his chest, in the way that his palms aren't slick with sweat. His ring falls from his hand, biting thorns loosened—he assumes—by Lenore's death.

_Isaac's done it._

Hector closes his eyes, savouring the absence of the sour taste of his panic. He inhales on reflex—not in any need for air—and catches a scent that has him lunging to his feet, spinning almost 360 degrees in his haste to locate it.

Hector blinks and he’s standing over Isaac’s body, the blood on the floor drawing his eyes repeatedly from the grayish cast of his proud face. He feels himself start to shake then, a mewling sound that must come from his throat rending the still air.

“You did this,” he whispers to himself, hands raising to pull at his hair. Words rise, unbidden, from his memory, his father’s scorn blooming fresh as the day it was uttered. “Stupid, _stupid_. Useless whelp.” He rocks back and forth on his heels, battering his scalp with his nails.

A wet cough stills the scream in his throat before he can let it out.

He’s kneeling beside Isaac before he realizes it, hands fluttering uselessly around the torn edges of the hole in his chest.

“Hector,” Isaac coughs again, eyes crinkling, trying to focus.

“I—I’m here.” Hector leans over so that he’s directly in Isaac's vision. Unexpected joy crosses Isaac’s face at his appearance; a man seeing a mirage of water in the desert.

Hector’s crying, twin red trails dripping down his cheeks and chin. “I’m sorry,” he sobs, voice shaking with emotion. “This is all my fault.”

“Shhh,” Isaac soothes, trying to raise a hand to comfort him and frowning at it’s lack of cooperation. He says something in another language that Hector’s never heard him speak before, something lyrical, something that catches at him and settles warmth in his bones, telling him exactly what Isaac means even if he doesn’t understand the words.

“I can see it,” Isaac says then in English. “Home.”

“You can’t die,” Hector wails suddenly, frightened to lose him—lose the sensation of those foreign words. “I won’t let you.”

“The time of a person’s death is known only to God, and there is no God but Allah.” The words are faint, barely a whisper at the end.

“Goddammit, I said no!”

“Let me rest, Hector.”

Isaac takes one last hitching breath and goes limp.

“No!” Hector’s voice is so strong, so like Isaac’s used to be when he says, hands pounding the bloody floor in his stubborn rage, “I can’t... I won’t live in a world where you don’t exist.”

He feels it then, feels the itch of his incisors extending in his mouth, his claws curling sharply, tortured psyche barely able to control the flood of his emotions. Instinct guides him in bringing his wrist to his fangs and tearing open the flesh. Bloodlust surges in him at the taste—old blood, powerful blood, _her blood_ welling on his tongue—but he holds it back enough to pry Isaac’s mouth open and shove the gash between his blue lips. Just like she did to him.

He shudders, disgust and self-loathing causing him to heave again, but he keeps his wrist steady. His blood drips slow, each drop viscous, seeming to cling as though too precious for his body to part with. He counts to one-hundred and twenty before he massages Isaac’s throat in the imitation of a swallow and falls back, too hungry—too new—to give up any more blood. He hopes against all hope that he’s done enough.

_Think about how he’ll hate you…_

***

Isaac rises with a terrible hunger. He turns to his side with a groan and meets ice blue eyes, their owner tight with anxiety.

“Hi,” Hector rasps.

Isaac’s eyes, sharp as an eagle’s, catch the glint of fang Hector’s plush lips reveal as they shape the greeting. With the speed of an anvil falling from a cliff, he comprehends how Hector is still alive, and what he’s done.

Isaac blinks his eyes closed. The pain of it, of being denied judgement from Allah himself—the possibility of Jannah—too great to stand.

“I told you to let me rest.”

“I know.” Hector’s voice is choked, distorted by his tears.

Isaac sighs, grief and anger and terrible affection drowning him and lunges for Hector’s throat…

***

**Northwestern Montana, USA 2020**

The sound of the screen door closing startles Isaac from his memories. Siobhan comes back out onto the porch holding a broom and dustpan. She doesn’t look at him as she bends and starts sweeping up the glass of his shattered teacup, but Isaac feels her censure all the same.

He swipes a hand over his face, wiping his bruised expression away like those pieces of ceramic.

The door to the kitchen opens and closes again as Siobhan dumps the shards into the garbage and comes back out, brushing her hands on her jeans like she managed to get them dirty.

Or maybe he’s projecting; guilt stirred by the letter.

“Well,” Siobhan says, crossing her arms over her chest, hip jutting out in a peevish little tilt. “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

“Not particularly.”

“Tough shit!”

Isaac just laughs, jaw rocking with the ghost of pain and his leftover angst. “One day habibti, you’ll understand that some things are best left to the past.” He pushes up from his chair and comes over to kiss Siobhan’s cheek, politely ignoring her huff of disbelief.

“Where are you going?” she asks when he’s at the bottom of the porch steps.

Isaac stops and tilts his head back, expression inscrutable, looking at the stars in the night’s sky. They twinkle defiantly, as if to taunt him with the fact that they aren’t yet ash.

_Yours until my corpse molders or the stars turn to ash in the sky. Whichever comes first…_

He takes a breath for shits and giggles, grounding himself to the earth under his boots, and watches his exhale condense in the air.

“Fall’s coming.” It’s a mantra more than an answer. A pleasant reminder that all things come to an end.

Isaac doesn’t wait for Siobhan’s response as he starts to walk the fields. She’ll catch up if she wants to. For now, he runs his hands through the tall grass and feels the slight chill of the air, the rot and decay already starting to set in.

He tunes his ears into the sound his livestock, of the bugs and mice crawling in the grass, the hunting owls perched in the trees. He listens to it all, mind a riot.

He walks until the first light of dawn drives him inside, ignoring the way he feels packed with curiosity—with wonder—for the first time in forever.

***

habibti = my darling in Arabic

[Jannah](https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z6mhgk7/revision/3) = Those who have performed more good deeds than bad will enter **Jannah** , or Paradise. Jannah is a place described as a 'garden of everlasting bliss' and a 'home of peace'. In Jannah there will be no sickness, pain or sadness.


End file.
